Stephen: This is your host, Stephen Sargeant. We have a fun episode of Around The Coin podcast. We're talking real world asset tokenization. Everything from real estate, debt, stocks, issued bonds, everything you can think of coming on chain. We went from security token offerings to real world assets, and we're talking about this with the one and only.

Edwin Mata from Brickken. He's a co-founder and CEO, and he talks about the passion and the fun you have to have in building a business like that. But we also talk about the regulatory concerns, the issues, and the amazing platform they have that make private investors out of all of us. This is a fun episode, especially if you're both in Web2 Tradify and in crypto and Web3.

This covers all the elements and how to get into this world. I love this episode. You'll like it too. Let me know if you let me know. If you really like it though, reach out to me at the end of the podcast and I'll give you some insights on how to reach out to Edwin.

Stephen: This is your host, Stephen Sargeant, the Around The Coin podcast.

We have Edwin Mata here to talk about Brickken. He's a CEO and co-founder. We're gonna get a lot into FinTech, digital asset tokenization, decentralization. We're gonna talk about everything on this podcast. Edwin, thank you so much for joining us today.

Edwin: Oh the contrary. Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be on your show.

Stephen: Awesome. You know, most of your, I was looking at your, pretty much your resume and profile on LinkedIn. Most of your early jobs have been legal jobs, you know, very, you know, and it is funny 'cause usually lawyers are very lo logical, practical and crypto seems like the last area to explore. How did you even get into crypto to begin with?

Edwin: Yeah, no, I mean usually I'm a name a lawyer by default. Then I enter into tech and that's where like my mind changed completely. 'cause I was in a startup and it was more, like you said, unconventional the approach, what they were doing. And in 2018 they landed a grant for blockchain involvement. So they wanted to test.

How it was working. And they put me on top of that as a project manager because they wanted to see if agreements could be executed in the blockchain. That was the whole grant. And I had to start reading about blockchain. 'cause I knew about Bitcoin, but I didn't. I was not there. Right. And I started reading and I was like, oh wow.

I like it. It kind of makes sense. How it was, how like the whole traceability mutability, because I'm a lawyer, I don't like things to change. You sign and executes. That's it. So, I'm now having a lot of fun. I, I took the right decision to enter the chaos in the Wild West, but in reality, like the foundations is very solid.

It's actually super logical what we're doing.

Stephen: I love it.

You know, I thought, you know, back in the day when I first started, around 2017, people said, you know, smart contracts are gonna eliminate lawyers. We don't need, you know, legal agreements. Everything's gonna be on chain. I don't feel like we've gotten any closer to that. What are your thoughts when it comes to, you know, agreements and smart contracts?

Smart contracts are fairly dumb. There's not that leniency that you kind of need in everyday agreements like a landlord or tenant agreement. You don't want it to be, if you didn't pay the rent by 1159 on that day that you're automatically locked out the door.

Edwin: Yeah.

Stephen: flexibility aspect. What are your thoughts?

Are we close to smart contracts or placing agreements, or are we not close at all?

Edwin: Yeah, so in contracts, for example, there you will never be able to code any subjective. So with the landlord, like, yeah, the, the door don't work. It is not a smart country that say like, oh yeah, actually the door don't work. You have to repay, or you have to go fix it. Kind of like Subjectiveness will never be coded, but objectiveness.

To a certain degree, but I do sense that financial instruments, which is still contracts, that is perfection on the blockchain, but the relationship between private parties will not be embedded on code. So that was a misconception back in the day. But the more you get into how financial, like liquidations or debt or kind like the financial instruments, which is very logical A to B.

B. Those can be perfected on chain because it's very fast, and then you can prove where the funds are, who the parties are. There's a lot of things that make it very lean, and that's why I was here. That's why it makes sense to me.

Stephen: I love it.

You know, you also teach you know, students about blockchain and legal tech. What are some of the concepts that you believe like students struggle with? Is there like one point, like I'm sure when you first saw Bitcoin, you're like, there's no way regulators are gonna allow us to have digital synonymous cross border payments without them getting their cut.

Right? Like what is a concept that you think your students still struggle with today?

Edwin: The basics, like, what is blockchain like? That's a, they don't understand that it's just a new technology. Like it's not a wire change. It doesn't mutate what you're trying to do just because you put something on chain. It doesn't create a new thing, kind like it's just an embedded technology where things run on top.

Right. So when I have to explain even the minimum constables, what is blockchain? They're like, oh, so that means, like you said, like, oh, contracts are being on chain. No, not everything has to be on chain. It's just part of the process. Of you using a new technology out there because it has some sweet spots, but does everything have to be on chain?

No. And I think that was a great conception on 2018. Like everybody was putting everything on chain just for the sake of it. And it's like, no, it's just a new technology. Like you don't, whatever fits you, you have to keep it, but don't overplay that the cars that you have, so the,

Stephen: back at bringing everything back on chain again with real world. We went from like everything on chain to maybe not everything, to everything back on chain again, guys, that's what we need. You see a lot of students, you're obviously in the industry. Is there any specific characteristics that you see people are a little bit more successful or they, you know, this clicks a lot quicker for them than others?

Like is there a certain characteristic or way of thinking?

Edwin: It's funny when you say like, we are gonna talk about FinTech because FinTech for me is the best use case. I mean, right now, stables of course, but payments, remittances and all of these things that a lot of people are not used to it. Like for example, I'm Mexican, I. I used to live in the States, send them money to Mexico, super expensive without like, like they just, we had like, Monex.

So MoneyGram, like, they will take like 12% on, on the remittance cents. That's crazy. And now you can do it for 1 cent. Like there's a couple of things that it's so efficient what we're doing. That payments liquidations a lot of debt like banking instruments where you go to the middleman, they suck you life out of it.

You can do it now with a P two P, like there's a lot of fish is being built. So for me, FinTech and chain, it's the best use case.

Stephen: What's the current state of like, what do you believe the current state, because I feel like there's a lot of iterations when we say FinTech. That's very broad. There's, you know, banking as a service now that's kind of in the FinTech, there's crypto exchanges, there's, you know, your domain where I think your, a lot of your expertise, which is real world asset tokenization.

What's the current state we are in right now and what are some things that, you know, maybe then we can go into brick it.

What is our current state of real world assets today?

Edwin: So five years ago, but I only talked to clients to educate them. Really that's, I think that's why I became a teacher because I was educated all my clients as to what its organization. Five years ago, like the real world as it was not even a word. They used to call it security token offering. So it

Stephen: Yeah, I remember the STOs that came out right after ICOs and people, people started getting dinged.

Edwin: Yeah, that was a horrible pronoun because everything was a security and one whatnot. So I think right now there's a lot of specialization in the sense that, okay, not everything is that. Not everything is that. And I believe that we are in a very mature point if you, from five years ago to now, the conversation different and still we are very far away, like another five years for us to thrive.

The thing that is gonna enable everything is the adoption of stable. So I'm very happy. For example, today there was a news in the Spain that they're thinking about opening bank accounts where there's a duality where you can have stables in Europe, you already have it in Switzerland, and another countries already testing like that.

When it becomes normal, our whole sector becomes normal because the whole ramp and all ramp still the hardest point of paint for newcomers to enter the blockchain technology.

Stephen: And I think most of us don't care. Like we just want to send the money. We don't care if it's stable coins in the background, if they're doing FX in the background. We just want to be able to press a button that says, Hey, can you can convert the amount I have in my account? Can I send that to somebody?

Without, you know, spending $55 on a wire transfer, having to call the bank because they have, you know, misspelled the name of the, you know, of the, the destination bank and like we've all been there trying to send a wire transfer. It's no easier to send to Canada than it is to Mexico. By the way, if you're in the us you know, a lot of our clients have to pay us through wire transfer or, you know, sending it through other whales.

Edwin: No, absolutely. I mean in, in the end it's we, the technology is just a part of the journey, but it's not the end journey. And I think that's a misconception with a lot of blockchain players where they sell the blockchain product, right? And we supposed to simplify a process of our already well established technology banking works.

We hate it, but it works. At least I can get you the money to you. Right? I have to. To, to walk, to send it to you. Right? I mean, at least that works. So what we're doing now is optimization, but sometimes we oversell it and say, oh, blockchain is no end user. Same way they log in, wants to click and send. Like why are we making everything so complex with different chains, different stables, different wallets?

I mean, we are creating a full product that is not necessarily needed. So I think maturity is now because we're working on abstraction and us are experience, which should started from the beginning, not, not now, thinking, oh, we made a mistake on the journey. We made everything too complex.

Stephen: We were too busy disrupting the banks that we needed to get bank accounts from later on. You know, the funniest thing, it's like, it's like you're a teacher, so it's like, Hey, we're gonna disrupt Harvard, but by the way, we kind of need your classrooms. We need your campus, we need your books, and we might need your teachers, but we're gonna disrupt you.

It's kind of like that. I always say, you don't hear the word disruption too much in anyone's vocabulary anymore. After many of the early disruptors weren't able to get bank accounts to actually build a big

Edwin: absolutely.

Stephen: Tell me about Brickken because I, you know, I watched your demo, extremely impressive, but I also have a ton of questions, so why don't you gimme, like, if nobody understand.

No, no one's ever heard of Brickken, let's say, which many of us already have. Give us the, you know, too long and don't read version TLDR, version of Brickken.

Edwin: Yeah, I mean, so basically we are a format of capitalization. So capital is very expensive and you need to have different outputs, like where am I gonna generate my next potential investment? Right? So I'm a company in real estate looking for a debt. Like you can issue it with a bank transfer. It gets complex.

So you wanna have like different channels. What we wanna grill them is you want bank transfer, we can give it, you want crypto, you can give it kinda like we just digitizing your bond or debt and putting it on chain for you to facilitate the format of capitalization. So I'm reduction as I'm not your middle middleman.

I'm not your ary. You go directly to your investor. You talk to your investor, less fee, you get more capital cross border. So in this sense, what I'm trying to do is just make capital more efficient, but also with less friction to obtain. So you lose less fees, but you also gain more traction. It's easier to onboard your investors.

So that's what we're trying to pursue when we say tokenization.

Stephen: What's the biggest use case? Can you give exa, you gave a a few different ones. What's the one that companies are really coming to you for and saying, Hey, you guys are really great at this. Can we, can we do more of

Edwin: Yeah, depth and bonds. I mean, right now the whole world still runs on depth. Countries owe each other, companies owe to the bank, like the whole world is one big mass of depth. So that makes sense to be in a digital format like tokenization. So we do have a lot of different sectors, gold, mine, mineral real estate, IP companies who they still pursue debt as a format of capitalization.

They say like, Hey, you know, I got, I don't know. I'm gonna make it up 1 million. Let me get 1 million with tickets of 10,000 or whatever, and I'll give them on top 50% a PY or 10% a PY. Since it's direct to the issuer and the investor, it, it is possible to give them higher a PY, that if you have a middleman, because the middleman will suck.

Part of the earnings. So you give them higher, re higher a PY, and that is why it makes sense for companies to embed the constant chain.

It's like me to you, Steve, and send me 15 K and I'll give you back 17 K. If you send me directly to me to my wallet and there's no middle man and you just charge like zero zero 1% on if you do USDC base, that's a friction in this transaction.

So it also allows me to give you back more because we didn't lose on the transaction. I.

Stephen: Because naturally, like if we had to do that right now, if I'm sending you 15,000, there's somebody taking a portion of that transaction fee and then when you have to send me back the funds, you know, in full there's somebody taking a trans and we're talking three, five, you know, depending on where you are in the world, 12, 15% and that kind of erodes.

It erodes the value that you have in that transaction. It has to make you think twice as to whether you wanna do that transaction in the first place, I'm assuming, which, which doesn't allow, you know, people to invest in certain areas that they would normally do because I'm assuming some areas the margins are not that big, that they can as absorb some of these high transactions fees.

Edwin: In this example, even though for example I'm in Spain, you, Canada, first world country, the bank of where your bank to buy the euro to send it to me will set it at the highest peak. 'cause they got euros back. They got their back markets where they buy euros very cheap and they, they do a markup. So they will sell you the euro at the high expensive.

And then the bank will swallow it through swift. So that's another transaction fee. And by the time it reaches some banks here, they charge for, for, for, for deposit if fees cross border. So it's kind of like you're losing on the conversion rate on the swift and on the deposit. And it's like if I have to return money and I already lose 7%, I will have to give you a higher a PY just to try to reach 15%.

So it's all about efficiency.

Stephen: That Forex is huge, right? Like even like if I'm paying, you know, US clients or receiving US clients, the banks aren't giving me the best rates on both sides of those deals.

Edwin: Yeah, no.

Stephen: I'm receiving, if I'm receiving us, they're giving me a low rate on the amount that I receive. And then when I need us to, you know, pay vendors, they're charging me at the highest.

So I'm losing so much value just in the exchange rate alone.

Edwin: Yeah, a lot of people don't figure out that even the bank transfers could not be necessarily the highest lose. Is the acquisition of the local currency, because that's where the banks make a lot of money. Like the, the, the money, the, what is it called? I don't remember the currency markets. Only banks play that you need huge amounts to start buying at cheap value, the currency of another.

That's why Monex is one of the biggest because they only play at that level. Like you need like 1 million to play and buy liquidity to, to do like a liquidity provider of, of currencies. There's a huge market other, and people don't understand that. Market. If a bank comes to play, you will never play at the same rate that they play.

So if they sell you two, 3% or four on top or whatever, you wouldn't even notice. Like you will be like paying because you don't even know where to acquire that currency.

Stephen: Exactly, and you, you know, because you're going to the same place that can actually facilitate the transaction as well, right? The reason why you're going to the bank isn't because they have the best four x rates, but that's the place that you have all your money and wanna facilitate the transaction. So using a third party is gonna cost you anyway.

And you know, when we talk about 3%, people might be like, oh no, that's not that much money, but. You have to think on a million dollar investment, 3%. I don't like to do public math either is about $30,000. That's the I, you know, probably like potentially some three months worth of somebody's salary that's working with you.

That's an astronomical amount when you think about the amount of investments or debt you're trying to obtain.

Edwin: Yeah, absolutely. And I think we make that mistake when we use all of these let's say middle authorities. Then we say a hundred Euros. Okay? Or a hundred dollars? 3%. Three, okay. I won't buy a coffee tomorrow. We have to talk about percentages, like 3% is a lot. I mean, make the math, okay, it's a coffee, but dude, if under the span, and you don't spend hundred euros, one, let's say you spend over there spent a hundred thousand.

You just spend 3000. You just spend a full salary paying somebody to transfer you money just because. And that's a misconception. We say, we talk about numbers when we have to understand the complexity and amount that a percentage entails. Like we lose a lot of money and little ticks here and there. I mean, for example, when you pay to the bank a coffee, right? You got your car machine. And here they say like 1%. Yeah, 1%, 1%, 1%. Like the the little coffee shop, losing 1% to pay with MasterCard. It's crazy. And then you bring American Express and they're like, no, I don't want that one. They charge me like 4%. It is like crazy easy.

Stephen: When you think about like, the 3% to your point, adds up. Especially like when inflation's going up by three to 4%,

Edwin: That's it. You're done.

Stephen: losing every year that you don't activate these funds as well. So it's like keeping it and not spending it or not investing is almost just as bad as trying to invest and losing those transaction fees.

Now you're all about putting things on chain. We ju, we joked about, you know, we're getting back to the point of putting everything back on chain. What are some financial products or are there any products where you're like, this doesn't quite make sense to put it on chain. It's just, you know, it doesn't make sense.

Is there anything that comes to mind that might be too complex to put on chain or isn't needed to put on chain? Because you know, in our traditional Web2 world, we're still pretty efficient.

Edwin: Yeah. So I mean there, there's there's building products right now, right? So for example, equity and chain. Right now, it's a complicated product just because it needs a secondary market where it's tradable and the secondary markets are being traded. Even though it is as complex and we are not built there, it does make sense to put equity on chain because of the transparency, the capitalization, but it's not there at that optimal level.

So let, I will say that even though for me often instrument instruments, at some point or later, they will be embedded on chain. We have to look at the maturity of the market. So right now I do believe certain products are non mature enough to be fully on chain, even though the capabilities and characteristics.

Some point or another, they're more efficient. So that comes to what can be bought on chain. And that's why for me, I mean debt and money market funds, which are super liquid, kind of like those things that are very liquid by itself or by its nature, belong on chain because the chain is just puts everything on two x kind of like super speed, super efficient.

And for that we need financial instruments that by default are heavily liquid.

Stephen: Right. Now, you know, looking at your website and the way I saw that video, it looked extremely easy to start the tokenization process. Is there any areas where builders on the platform, you know, have trouble setting up their tokenization process or things that are like, Hey, this is very new to me. I don't wanna just, you know, press the buttoning go if I'm not a hundred percent sure.

Where are the areas where some of your builders are like, Hey, I really wanna make sure that we're doing this properly.

Edwin: Yeah. And this is a, a, i for, for you and me, maybe a very stupid naive mistake, but if you go to bin to buy, let's say USDT, like when you drop down, it pushes you b and b chain. Like, because by default you go to Coinbase, it pushes you the base. So let's say that the asset owner issues the asset on Polygon and they say like, okay, we only sell USDT on Polygon.

The Web2 investor that already has difficulty gathering the stable coins go to bin, buy the USDT on BNB chain, goes to the asset donor, tries to buy, and it says, no, don't match. What is the, the guy who has no clue about chains? It's like, you already made my life difficult understanding USDT, U-S-D-C-U-S-D one.

Stephen: Right. Omni chain Omnipro.

Edwin: yeah, so those little things. Matter for the Web2, because they don't speak the same language of the stable coins of the chains, of the wallets. So that's, for us, it's kind of like, it's such a naive thing that we are trying to push a lot of cross chain interability through chain or starting layers here because our end user.

Literally they just said like, we started, we just want click, pay, receive, done amount. That's it. I don't wanna figure out where, how done who, like why? Just give me the platform. That is one click deposit. Receive an amount.

Stephen: Are there any areas where companies could implement this more? Like I know you obviously have a lot of use cases. I'm thinking like employee bonuses, even crowdfunding versus like traditional vc. Where can companies utilize brick and mortar that maybe not be their pri, like their number one use case, but they're like, Hey, now that we're on this platform, we might as well start utilizing some of these other features.

Edwin: Yeah, I, and you brought a, a very big one. I mean, now the world is remote, right? I mean, little companies super remote, even big ones. Cross-border payments is a huge pain for an employee, and people don't figure it out because corporate lose a lot of money on, on those transfers. Right? So even with the conversion, everything, so paying an employee that is in, not in your hq or not even your continent through stables, like, it's so efficient.

Like all my, all my employees that we have on remote, they all get paid on the stables and they're super happy because they're like, okay, wherever I go, I do my conversion, my off round. Now it gets. Cheaper and whatnot. So there's a lot of things that make sense. So we will always go and say like, what is the best use case payments, let's say whatever payment capital format we can think of on chain is more efficient versus the legacy.

Like legacy works. No, let's not say like, oh yeah, now we improving the world, we're just making something more efficient. And for me, payments will always make more sense.

Stephen: Especially like when you're paying something like an employee bonus, it's like, hey, you want to be that to be the cheapest form of getting funds to your, to your employees as possible, because they're already gonna get taxed at a certain rate. The last thing you wanna do is add a few more percentages when you're trying to reward somebody.

Right.

Edwin: Absolutely. I mean, I completely agree with you. You're already paying taxes that you don't want to put a new burden when they lose the next amount because okay, good. Companies will say like, Hey, you know, like I swallow the, the fee. But maybe others will be like, we share the fee because when you do a bank transfer, the bank transfer allows you to share fees or put the fee on the other person.

So those options, I mean, depends on the quality of the. Of the employer, but that option can really make a difference on the end user, which is your employer employee.

Stephen: And you know, obviously my background's like crypto compliance, blockchain investigations. I see that you're doing the know your customer, know your business. On both the initiative of the tokenized asset and those that are investing in it, which is, you know, I think that's a huge undertaking. I think that was the problem with ICOs is that, you know, they just used to say no US investment, obviously, 'cause they didn't wanna get dinged by the Securities Commission, but like, can you share what are your regulatory requirements, especially from an AMLs perspective or a securities commission perspective.

Edwin: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, coming from the background of legality, we always thought like whatever we build has to be compliance first, because we were hitting at that time the STO market, right? It was many things that was building. We saw it like in the future, whatnot. So, when we put the KYB as a necessity, we could have done more frictionless and say like, Hey, everybody can shoot the SDO, kind of like a pop funnel, like radically, right?

But also we wanna build something that is compliant and trustworthy and trust. It's something that is the most expensive thing. Like one day they trust you, next day they don't trust you. Build that up. Horrible experience, right? So from the foundation we say like, you know, KYB. Bank level, like I'm not doing or requesting anything else that a bank account that like the bank to open a bank account will request, but that deters a lot of bad players because if you don't know, what are your bylaws, your proof of, of, of domicile, your proof of funds?

Kind of like some basics that any company who is a real company has at the alarm length. Then they don't, they wouldn't even know how to shoot a security. Right? So KYB on that side. And then for investors, the same, a normal KYC, something that for you to open a Revolu bank account Id face recognition, proof of good to go, and you will not know how many people drop.

Like even the id, I was like, oh, but I wanna be KYC less. It's like, yeah, but we are dealing with securities and the other person with a ml, they're gonna go into a, a potential default. And it's like, you know, kind of like that's, it's a different product. You wanna go well West, go

Stephen: wanna go DeFi, you wanna go play out there in the, in the DeFi protocol world and get made up 30% API go, a pfi. Go right ahead. Right?

Edwin: Yeah, go get your Luna. Go get your 150% a P. Right?

Stephen: Or your anchor. I am curious though, you know, how do I make sure, now we're talking about digitalizing pretty much di digital. These are digital investments. These are digital asset investments. How do I see, like, and we're talking about that, how do I see as part of an agreement or an investment that now if I'm investing in somebody else's debt, I'm assuming.

How do, I'm sure that where I rank, right, and traditionally you can see the lean or you know who's ahead of you when it comes to priority. How do I do that when we're in the digital asset framework?

Edwin: I mean, it's since everything. Like the funny thing about this is that blockchain itself, it's a ledger, like the definition of it, it's, it's, it's a ledger. So financial accounts is a major book. It's a, I don't know the word in English, but you literally can see all the transactions and that allows you to really have a lot of data as to who you are inside.

Like what is your percentage, like one click. You don't need to go and analyze your. Excel not gonna say handwritten, but like manually written down potential errors. And then you have to update like all transactions by itself. Since it's a public layer, you can capture all the data and start building a lot of analytics.

What is the position of that investor from the issuer, but also on you, because maybe you wanna grab like 10% of the debt just because you feel like, or 50% of the company. All, all of that. So. With all of this information that is public, you can really grab it and have on point, real time 24 7, all information you want.

And that's the beauty of it, because I don't have to provide it to you, like I just have to give you the, the, let's say the front that captures all the data versus other ones that it's super secretive. Like I'm the central authority, it's my information. I don't want to give it to anybody because because of law, because I don't care or anything kind of like.

This is the nature of what we're building. It has to be more transparent. And people will say like, but I don't want it to be too transparent than suitcase. Then we have other potential information. But the beauty of this is like, you can always know your position where the money is. How did they off ramp?

Are they on ramp? Are they paying dividends? There's a lot of information that makes transaction more trustworthiness,

Stephen: So they

Edwin: trust more

Stephen: both from like the real world, like, hey, we have an agreement that this company has, like they can see the real world and the digitize, like where they stand, right. You're pulling both of those sides, and I'm assuming you do that in the KYB process. You're pulling any information about this company, it's standing who's investing in it, the, you know, ultimate beneficiary owners, et cetera.

So they now have like almost like a digital dashboard, which is a lot better than like, I, I'm assuming the physical way of doing this or the, the tangible way of doing this with paperwork.

Edwin: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think you nailed it. I mean, we request all of this information to be digitized and we store it in the token. So every token has embedded the link, RPFS of all the links of the company. They have their, their dashboard, or for the company investment and everything. And this is about building trust.

So I give you a minimum, right? Like I am, I request a company, the K will B, let's say the minimum, but a company who wants to raise the million, the minimum is not enough. So they could deposit. Business plans, white paper prospectus, all of that information is for them to be able to make it to the investor.

So who is really trust and wants to build that they can deploy absolutely all they want to build that trust. I'm not telling them how to raise money. I expect them to, to really comply with, you know, I'm raising 1 million. I'm not just gonna request a button and say, deploy 1000 and I'm good to go. Like, it depends on the issuer.

I'm just a tooling box.

Stephen: Do you think you have an advantage building Brickken because you come from a legal background where like other companies maybe come from a just solely a technical background. So they always get tied up, going back and forth with their own legal departments where like you're building with like legalities in mind.

So it allows you maybe to be more streamlined, more quicker in releasing some of your features.

Edwin: Yeah, obviously I'm biased, but it, it is, it, it is a night and day like I see other tokenization platforms either worrying about the technology I. And this is weird for me to say, like tokenization, the technology is not the game. It's, you're using securities like super heavily regulated. You always have to try securities.

In the past, through my m and a already passed. I was already dealing with all this asset as a class, understanding how it flows. So I already suffered those years and I'm not an expert in capital markets, so I had to study a lot. But the learning queue was lower and now I know a lot on capital markets, how it works, IPOs and everything.

So what I'm trying to say here is like, this is a very regulated game and unfortunately a lot of people think it's a tech game. So we have great, maybe business person will say, I'm enter tokenization enter, and they're like, oh, do I need a license? Okay, I'm gonna go to law firm 100 K. Oh, now to do this, do I need to speak with the sec?

Who's the sec? Wait. A sec. Is there a Italian sec? You know, kinda like some native questions that are not there for people already with certain backgrounds.

Stephen: Right. It's easier

Edwin: tourists are coming.

Stephen: in this industry than to learn the legalities and the regulatory requirements. I think just like as a blockchain investigator, it's easier to teach somebody how like the, the technology crypto and how it moves on the blockchain versus trying to teach them critical thinking and like to have a compliance mindset.

That's really hard to teach, I think for

Edwin: Yeah.

Stephen: have a B can token, you might call it by a certain name, like a brick token. Which fuels this platform? Is it solely just to cover, like, explain the token ons? Is it just about conducting transactions? Is there other utility where people can send the BKN token versus like USDC and then they can use it for when they're investing maybe in other other entities?

How does it work?

Edwin: Yeah, it's so when we build the, the token numbers, we were, we, we, we come from Web2, but we have a token and we learn the Web3 mechanics, kind of like the launchpad deal. Where you could stake certain vks to access certain options of a certain degree of investment. So we're trying to figure out yet we do have the payment transaction fees from the insurer, but now we're onboarding the investor into the ecosystem of that, but without putting friction.

So it's an ongoing process as to how we add more utilities, because some clients are lean on get Yeah. You know, kind of like get the community of. Of holders who can invest here. And then we put a attraction sort of launch pads too. Now we're trying to generate even some other investment opportunity to U-S-D-T-U-S-D-C 'cause we're learning in the process.

So our B key NI would like to say is kinda like the. The fulfillment of our knowhow. Every time we find something radically that we like or we use, we see how we can embed it for the issuer or the investor. Kind of like it's, it's a reward opportunity never should be used as a friction point where I can only do so if it's like, if you do plus, right?

Not, not, not a blocker, but a new door to something that you feel rewarded.

Stephen: Yeah, why not get BAN token? If I can, if I'm doing, you know, if I use a platform a certain way, if I do certain amount of transactions, it's nice to get a little bit something back in return. Other than 3% fees for four x conversion talk to me. You guys created the report on, you know, the real world asset tokenization landscape.

And you talked about the emergence of debt tokenization. Maybe just give us a high level, I think you've talked about debt, but give us a high level of like what has opened up the floodgates in this type of, in this region, especially in Europe.

Edwin: Yeah, so I mean it's, it's a new format of capitalization where we started measuring, you know, let they say like real estate is still kinda like the biggest asset class that is being tokenized. Well, I mean money, it is because of stable coins. But then say like, okay, what is then. Funds, maybe with securities.

But if you look at the mass is real estate. But real estate by itself doesn't get tokenized. Right? Because the property of the building is not what you tokenize, it's the financial instrument, the underlying financial instrument to that asset class. So by default, real estate promoters, were always looking into depth for, for mon, for capitalizing to do, or the building or the flip or whatever.

So as we see all that study, we can figure out that yes, the first one is stable coins. Money market funds are big by default, but the biggest asset class generating is debt linked to real estate. So we were studying and analyzing all this market. We have to understand that the asset by itself is not the tokenized, is the underlying asset.

And by default, the debt still in Web2, the biggest asset, the biggest financial instrument being used. So in Web3 makes sense. We're not radically changing all financial markets. We're just gathering what is done in the past and then just optimizing with the technology, and that's why I believe debt will still be and used to come.

The biggest asset, the biggest financial instrument embedded on chain.

Stephen: How does EU has the, you know, the markets and crypto assets regulation to act? It's probably the most comprehensive digital asset act around the world. Some may seem extremely burdensome as well, but how do these regulations impact either your business or the tokenization tokenized asset industry as a whole?

Edwin: Yeah, I mean this is kind of like a, it, it's a cost burden because you cannot deploy as fast as you would like. It's a know-how also burden because if you don't have any house, you need to look it outside. So it's, again, cost. The, the good thing, if I may say that being overregulated is like if you sell in Europe, you can sell everywhere.

I. Kinda like you already went to the highest degree of training that when you go out there, it is like, oh, that, that's easy. And it happened to us, like we started moving around a couple of other countries just coming from Europe. We were, we were like, this is a relief. And the client would be like, oh, but you know, it's complic complicated.

It's like, let me sit down. Let's have a coffee. Let me tell you what is complicated. Complicated means Europe.

Stephen: And it's funny because those looking at you and saying, Hey, you got license there, it's easier for banking relationships 'cause they're like, Hey, you've already, you've got the bit license basically of New York. Now we know that, you know that you've reached a certain level of regulatory requirements, but more importantly, all your other partners are like, Hey, this is the T, this is the top tier of, you know, regulated entity.

Let's just deal with them because we don't have to worry if they were able to get that license.

Edwin: Absolutely. I mean, for us, we grabbed it as a selling point because we, we enter the Spanish Sandbox in 2021, so before. We did that to develop what we did. We sat down with the regulator to explain that we wanted to be a software, not a placement agent dealing with securities. They were like, I, I don't like you at all, like you tried to break my system.

It is like, okay, I'm happy, but is it legal or not? That's the only thing I want. And they silence that. We cannot say if it's legal or not. It's like, okay, thank you very much for saying that it is legal. That's all I wanted to hear. Then we went in 2024 to the European samos and we sat with 27 regulators at different time.

I mean, just understanding how they think and why they're so protective also allows us to develop a better product because we started understanding where are the areas, right? And that for us, built a lot of know-how. So when we talk to other clients and they say like, okay, why you another American company?

And I say, it's like. Come on. See the sec. Yeah. The SEC is the biggest beast. We know that. But the European regulator, oh, that's a criminal. That's like they don't want business to thrive, so they will push absolutely everything they own on legality to say like, we are protecting because we are scared of the, of the innovation.

So

Stephen: example of that is tether in the European market and even stable coins in general, they're pretty much making stable coins. Just like, they might as well just make it a tokenized, digitalized asset

Edwin: It is horrible.

Stephen: 'cause it's, the stablecoin innovation's pretty much lost in Europe, and I don't know deep down, but you know, I'm sure even if you comply, it's like basically you're just giving them a traditional financial product.

At that stage. You're losing a lot of the innovation. Would you agree with that statement?

Edwin: Absolutely.

I, there's a funny story here with the stable coins. If you are not a Euro back stable Coin, you can only have volume of 1 million per day.

Stephen: Yeah.

Edwin: Like that's it there. There's no stable coins in Euro because if you're not Euro back, let's say all of other ones, after all the hurdles are getting regulated after getting the license, after all of the things, they block you on the volume because they want the Euro back to thrive.

And it's like. You're thinking so small, like 27 countries, but you guys are very small as a, as a volume of, of people. Like Brazil is already, I think almost there's more people than in whole Europe. Like stop thinking, like small stop protecting the market because you're killing it. So protectiveness obviously let's not innovation.

So with the stable Coin market, like people laugh, it's like the other day, I don't know. Circle a couple of months ago said like, oh, we reached 50 million market cap, 50 million market cap. Like, have you seen other stable coins? But circle is circle. So they were super happy that they were thriving in Europe, but that 50 million cap that we're celebrating a stable Coin in Europe is just laughable.

Stephen: And which is why I'm assuming, I don't speak to Tyler, but I'm assuming Tyler's like we can afford to pull outta this market and just focus. On the Latin of American market, like what they're building in El Salvador is huge because they can actually build there and build out the actual ecosystem versus trying to fit what they have into an existing ecosystem, which is what we're seeing in Europe.

You've tokenized, speaking of like millions and trillions, you've tokenized over $250 million worth of assets. It's probably gone up since I, even when I researched this in 14 countries. Two years. Any key learnings from, or takeaways from building a big business in this domain?

Edwin: Yeah, I mean, if I recommend something to future builders, never stop having fun. It took me a long time to remember that because if not, you focus too much on on the end goal and forget that the little wins are still huge wins, especially in business. Like one client signed. Celebrate that because if you focus on the hundred, then you will focus on the thousand and everything.

So when I started, when we started becoming successful is when the company switched a little bit the mindset instead of all, we have to be all, we have to do, all we have to do. Like we started understanding like as a team, like when you score a goal, everybody cheers. So when we score a goal here, let's cheer,

Stephen: I love that. I thought you were gonna say like, if you're a building in this space, don't build. I thought that's where you're gonna go. If I had to tell anyone anything, it would be like, go back to law school, go back to go back to teaching. It's easier there. That's hilarious.

Edwin: that's the second

Stephen: future of tokenized assets, like you talked about underlying debt when it comes to real estate, obviously the stocks, the bonds, equities is always gonna be, you know, ETFs is huge right now.

But, you know, where does it lie? Is it things like private credit, you know, liquidity instrument? Like where are we seeing the, the future of tokenized assets?

Edwin: Yeah, so we, I mean if we have a pyramid of adoption, I would like to think like the peak is stable codes, the easiest one. Then in the second one we, we seeing like money markets, TPOs, right? Some regulated instruments. The third one is the interesting one for me, which is private, created private markets and that's where we are building in brick, and that's where we see a lot more conversion.

And the four layer is still kind of like those words, the assets itself, kind of like the Revix, the Ferrari. That for me not makes sense, but at some point it might digitize and make fun or make make sense for some people. So right now we see a lot of touch on stable coins. TBOs, a couple of companies, did a marvelous job and mark money market microphones.

And that is allowing us, that people started testing the third layer, which is the thickest and biggest one. Because there's a thing that I'll die by is nobody knows what is the total value of private credits in the world. It's unmeasurable. We don't know, like we don't know new assets being built that needs debt or new companies being built that have equity.

So that's an unmeasurable trillion DU market. So that's kind of like the beauty of it. We don't even know what is a true value that it can be embedded on chain.

Stephen: To your point about Ferrari, all these influencers are sharing Ferrari anyway, so they might as well have, you know, a shared, shared interest or a shared, you know, stake in it. I'm curious because, you know, private investment is obviously how a lot of you know, organizations and people got rich, especially in the us.

But there was always restrictions, right? Like the accredited investor, you only, you have to have certain requirements in order to invest. Do you think this new tokenized asset's gonna give more exposure to an everyday investor like myself that might not meet these private investment requirements of having a million dollars, but hey, if I put a $25,000 in something, I might be able to get to the point where now I'm an accredited investor, or I might start getting into other investment areas.

To your point.

Edwin: Yeah, I mean the, it's, I think it's an ongoing process that they have to understand, not just for the technology's sake, but by itself. I. Kinda like it's ridiculous that only accredited investor have opportunities of investment because either they have more money or certain knowledge when right now accessibility is everywhere.

Right? So United States is one of the perfect case that I never understood the board. To get the accredited investor, they say, no, now you can get a test to become accredited. But I still don't leave. Like the retail, like you're a doctor in medicine, you're, well, like you went to Harvard, you still have to take a test to get a credit.

It. That guy went to Harvard, let him invest. He like, no, but he's not a credit investor. He doesn't have the financial knowledge. He like, are you sure? Maybe he does like give him the option, like it's our money. We should be able to, to lose it or win it. Because it's funny, like they don't let us invest in certain private equity funds.

But when you invest in the bank, you receive all these emails of certain risky products and it's like, oh, I can invest through the bank, but by my own I can't. I like, come on, gimme. Release the leash. So I think there's a innovation happening in regulation here in Europe. They reduce the burden on the credited, and I think it's gonna happen in a lot of countries because it is ridiculous.

Like they don't make sense some things, but who knows?

Stephen: Do you think this will help the industry get away from like, 'cause they can't invest in a lot of these, what we would say less risky investments compared to like they're spending all their money on NFTs and meme tokens and investing in speculative assets like that. Will this get, you know, this allow, this platform allows to invest in something that's a little bit more traditional.

Versus like kind of the speculative nature that we have been able to invest in. So where we're seeing a lot of young people lose their money.

Edwin: I think that is a great question. I had not thought about that like that, and I think it makes sense. I mean, if you give them the opportunity to, to invest in ing what is, what, what is clear now is people will invest in whatever, right? Like literally

Stephen: right? So if they have access to GameStop, they'll spend all their money on GameStop and it's like, well, they haven't really thought that through. How do we give them a more variety of investments that they could invest in? Maybe, maybe they would spend a little bit more time understanding what their options are.

Versus just investing as your point. Investing in anything that they can

Edwin: Yeah. No, I mean, I mean, I mean for that thought, I, I, I really like it. I mean, once you open the, the, the tab for certain more regulated that you didn't do, but they are more trustworthy, then people will start understanding that, hey, you know, there's the risk gambling perspective, but there's also the less risky, which I still commit to.

But if I'm invested in a, in, in, in a meme. By all means, I'll invest somewhere else. You know, kind of like, gimme that opportunity. I think that's a, I like that thought. I am gonna keep it.

Stephen: Yeah, don't worry. Your marketing team can pay me late open, open you up. Open you guys up to a whole other audience because I hear, you know, obviously there's influencers and TikTok now and it's like friends that I've never heard talk about investment are talking about GameStop. It's like, guys don't just go for whatever's trending.

Like look at the options are available. But hey, at least they're now in. Now that they're interested, now that you can bring them into your point and educate them on like, Hey, yes, beam tokens, you can go from zero to a million, but you can also lose all your money. Here are some other options where the risk might not be, the reward may not be as high, but the risk may not be as high either.

But you can do this from the comfort of your computer or your phone, which is I think what Brickken provides. You know, not a lot of, you know, traditionally you have to go into the bank and to your point, you have to get sold on all these other things that you didn't go in there for. Talking to a person that may or may not be able to pass the test that, that we're talking about right now.

Edwin: Yeah. Perfect. Yeah.

Stephen: Paris Blockchain week, I believe. Like what's the vibe coming out of, you know, Paris Blockchain Week Is, was there any key takeaways from the conference? I'm assuming AI was talked about a little bit, but I feel like. The people that jumped on the AI train are kind of, they're towing the line now.

They wanna be able to take advantage if crypto goes up, but they wanna say that they're the futurist and they're AI savvy if AI runs away with it.

Edwin: Yeah, so I, I went to Paris blockchain weed like three weeks ago, and then I went to Dubai for talking 2049. Different completely crowds. I gotta say that in Paris blockchain week, there was less retail, but more corporate. Also, the market was way worse than it was last week. Right. But I did saw, like out of the three editions I've gone to Paris blockchain week, the less people put the most quality.

So it's a weird thing, kind of like I saw less people this time, but I engaged with more meaningful because there was a lot of. Asset owners stratify banks, which is kinda like who my target persona is for my reason. Right? But I was able to engage with such persons, and in Dubai, can you say about Dubai?

Like it's, it's Dubai. That's not, I gotta say it was very good because again, I saw a sense of, this is my second edition, right? This year. A more mature option to go to. I mean, you can still go full DJing and with Chill with the calls and Jos and who knows,

Stephen: And the shiny dresses.

Edwin: Yeah, of course at the, at the bling bling, you know, you get all of those people, which is fine.

I mean, you wanna have fun or whatever, or do your thing good. But at least this year, definitely there was a lot more option for what we wanna do, like the traffic corporate, which is not necessarily the boring crowd. Which we came to be. But the, the conversation that we wanna do is kind of like, okay, we really wanna use this for embedding like the, the whole solid foundation for the next financial capital markets to be embedded.

And that's thing, I believe that is truly what is gonna lock to trillions of euros coming on chain. It's not your memes, it's actually the RWAs. And for ai. Yeah, of course. To answer your question, AI is, everybody's in ai. Everybody is in ai.

Stephen: Does AI impact the, the, you know, the tokenized asset landscape at all, do you think? Or where does it have the most impact? Is it decision making? Is it like, Hey, now you have all this data about people using your platform. You can come up with trends, you can come up with ideas around like, Hey, follow this playbook.

Or, Hey, 90% of people that logged on in the last 30 days have invested in this asset class. Does that, is that where AI you think helps you and your platform the most?

Edwin: Yeah, so that's where we actually am testing the deployment of some AI structure. And it's in aiding the process of the issuance and understanding how to fulfill certain things. And in the investment side of things, it's something that we really wanna pursue. And it has to do with you like trends just.

Not telling you where to invest, but telling you like for example, if there's an investment opportunity on solar plan panels and you have no clue on solar panel, but it can tell you, you're know, kinda like over the last year there's been an investment and this updates kind like nobody's gonna become a great trader by default.

So maybe what we can do is just become a great learner by default and it's has all of these macro data, micro data, and it can get you in the process. Then by all means, listen, are they gonna always be profitable? I can tell you that if you're a bad trader and don't read the news, then you're a bad trader by default.

Might as well just listen to the AI.

Stephen: Yeah, exactly, exactly. If you're gonna make bad decisions anyway, might as well, might as well do it with a computer. Might as well do it with a, a large, at least the collective have made that bad decision and you won't be the outlier.

You successively raised 2.5 million, I believe recently. Was that done through the platform or through traditional vc?

Edwin: Yeah, no, we did this too, traditional. And there's a reason for it. I mean, we are still in the, in the growing phase and we have to to say like, we were backed, but my community knows this. I'm not gonna even do that. Oh, here's spoiler. Our series A is definitely gonna be, yeah. Our business know about this.

Like it was onboarding process that we. Because we, we build something that we love and I'm crazy about testing it. It's not that they didn't trust it there, it's that we needed that to be backed because a lot of people in the space, they're like, who bugs you? You know, kinda like, it's, it's, it's a shit.

Because if you, if my community backs me, I will say like, you know, I got a community. You, you only have three guys, three VCs who don't even love you. I have a lot, but the world still not ready for that. So we definitely gonna do it for our series A, because I'm excited to use my platform for my own x-ray.

Stephen: I love it. We saw a mesh in, that's in the kind of like stable Coin infrastructure. Their last raise I think was done through their platform, but yeah, it wasn't their first raise. It was definitely down the line. How do you plan to deploy this capital? It's not a ton of money. Like two and a half million is not a ton.

You get, as you said, you could probably spend that on lawyers just trying to set up an EU headquarters. How do you plan to deploy the capital?

Edwin: So on that sense luckily we are capital efficient and not in a, in a high consuming country, right? Because if we were in United States, 2.5 is like two solidity developers. That's it. Like good luck. So luckily for us, we were able to raise in a country that we pay good salaries, but not. Compared to other countries, and that gives a lot of runway and a lot of people will be triggered.

And it's like, I make a lot of profit. We have a lot of clients and, and it's weird Web3 to generate income and it's like, no, I generate income

Stephen: Yeah, it's

Edwin: funny thing. Yeah. Some VCs were

Stephen: don't use the entire amount of the capital to run the business, which is a little bit odd in whether it's tra traditional tech or Web3 tech. That seems to be the play. Well, we usually lose a million dollars a month, so the fact that we raised money is always a good idea.

What's on the roadmap for the team in 2025? We got three quarters left. What's on the roadmap?

Edwin: Yeah. So, the, the whole role, we wrote the vision as to what we wanted to pursue, and it was to end as a full SaaS company. So we really want that model recurring web tool. So the whole platform itself has to rebrand into a platform for Web2 companies. So that means obstruction of the wallet, obstruction of the chain, AI user experience.

So the full journey there has to take this year, and the goal is for a client to go into our website, sign up. Pay, organize on themselves without us being there. Like that's the objective. Let's see if we can comply.

Stephen: I love that. I love that. Do you think we could finally bring AI into disclosure? Like disclosures is the hugest thing that you have to deal with. That's like the premise of a lot of the security filings and the commissions and the, the penalties is all around disclosures. Right? That's, that's pretty much a lot of the regulators problem with DeFi and with crypto in general is that there's insufficient disclosures.

Do you think we could find a fun way? I was talking to Andrew McCormick from eToro, and we were laughing about maybe if we could just send these disclosures through the ai. They could come up with a song or a fun visual to show like, Hey, this is all pretty basic, but these are three key areas that you probably should be leaning in a little bit more about, or definitely consult a lawyer about.

Because the reality is, is. 99% of people aren't reading the disclosure. So what's the point of focusing so much on them if people aren't educating themselves on what they're getting anyway?

Edwin: I, I think it's a, it's a great summarizer with a bunch of bullet points and graphs, like once put a disclosure and gave me two pager with all the information with the key. And then just tell me where I can read more. I mean, a lot of ai, it's it's about guidance, so a lot of people use it for creativity.

It's like, oh, drop in that agreement. But they forget like it's a great reviewer. Like me as a lawyer, like this is gonna. Should I say this? Probably. Oh, you don't do your work anymore? Like I, I just say I a lot, so I receive an agreement that I don't feel comfortable with. The first clause is like, read again, gimme, gimme, gimme that clause in this thing.

Why is it put the, and I go back to back. It's like having another lawyer next to you. So I mean, with disclosures and everything. Or you don't understand some financial, because easy, I'm a company and I'll say like, my quality report, I bombard you with all these terms that you don't know and just like.

I'm not gonna sound stupid. I'm not gonna ask them if they're profitable because I don't even know what's a bit Yeah, like just send it today and be like, are this, is this company making money? Yes. No. No. Okay, perfect. That's it.

Stephen: tree, not making money. Okay. This puts us in a bucket of 99% of the companies. Why aren't they making money, right? Like at least get me to the place as to why. I know why, but you're right, right? All these decks and presentations and you're like, Hey, like, do I think I can make money? Despite all these numbers, is really when it comes down to, because the numbers aren't helping you in any way.

Edwin: Absolutely. That's it.

Stephen: Edwin, this has been such a fun conversation. I think you're, and I love that. You know, when I asked you the question about like what you've learned, it's like having fun. We've been able to have fun with a very serious and reg, highly regulated industry. I. But there has to be an aspect of like, Hey, what are we doing?

If we can get that, if we can send payments, if we can do this in a more efficient way, why aren't we doing it? Especially now, I think money's tied when money gets tied across the board. You have to find more creative ways to leverage that, that, or to send that money. So I think people are now looking at your platform like.

I don't need to get creative. I just need to use this platform to put a little bit back in our pocket because we can't just spend, you know, the million dollars that token 2049 to, you know, ride through the venue. With the camel.

Edwin: completely, completely.

Stephen: Anyway, where's the best place for people to find you?

Edwin: Yeah, of course. I mean, go to www.brickken.com where you can find information in the company. And if you want to learn more about me, I do tweet a lot. So @EdwMata, that's my Twitter. And hopefully you wanna engage more. And if you want to learn more about tokenization, by all means follow us.

We always say to, okay.

Stephen: I love it. You guys have some great reports. It is been great talking to you, Edwin. Thank you so much for joining the Around The

Edwin: Thank you very much. That was a lot of fun. Thank you very much. Till next time.

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